Jen & Dave: Mom and Pop Porn Pioneers

ATOMIC TV’s Scott Huffines has a spankin’ good time as hostess Jen rolls our the Welcome Wagon at a 1999 Jen and Dave Nudie Camera Club party in Cockeysville, MD (click for NSFW)

I read this week’s City Paper cover story about Internet amateur porn entrepreneurs “Jen and Dave” with great interest because it recalled that night, some 13 years ago, when Scott Huffines and I filmed a segment about the Cockeysville couple for an episode of our Baltimore City public access TV show, Atomic TV. The featured “nudie camera club” models that evening included “Simple”, “Lacy” and “Tree.” Scott had a spankin’ good time with the models and I sucked the toes of “Simple” to the amusement (or was it repulsion?) of her nearby boyfriend. To watch this 1999 ATV segment (warning: NSFW!), see “Atomic TV Visits Jen and Dave.” The City Paper article follows below. – TOM WARNER

MOM AND POP:Up and down (and up and down) with Baltimore County internet-porn pioneers Jen and Dave

Though the holidays have long since passed, and the trees are blooming outside, Christmas paper and lights still adorn the walls of Jen and Dave’s Baltimore County apartment, along with drawings by their 7-year-old twins. Fossils of ancient video-game systems and an old, broken computer haunt one shelf. The book Sex for Dummies is nestled between a copy of Obscene Profits (a history of internet pornography published in 2000), and the fifth and sixth volumes of the Harry Potter series, with a Christmas elf acting as a bookend. The apartment is cluttered with children’s toys—all of the couple’s more adult playthings are tucked discretely away. It is warm and stuffy and smells strongly of cats.

It hardly looks like a porn palace, but Jen and Dave (they prefer not to use their last name) have been making and distributing amateur internet porn here for the last 17 years. In fact, through trial, error, and exhibitionism, they helped invent online pornography. And if Frederick Lane, the author of Obscene Profits (in which the couple is featured), is right, they also helped pave the way for internet commerce in general.

In April 1995, a 20-year-old Jen, and her then boyfriend Dave took the No. 9 bus from their Cockeysville apartment to buy a 75 megahertz computer and a 14.4 modem, which was, Dave says, “pretty bitchin’ back then.

“We found Usenet, the ‘actual internet,’ and back then Usenet was pure content—just people sharing.”

In 1996, Libertarian think tank the Cato Institute estimated that there were “17,000 newsgroups [that] are unmoderated forums known as ‘UseNet’ newsgroups. A substantial subset of these are ‘alt’ (alternative) newsgroups, which tend to be devoted to relatively eccentric freewheeling discussions.”

Dave was drawn to this eccentric, freewheeling world. “And being a pervert, I quickly found porn,” he says.